If you’ve just started your self-hosted WordPress blog or are about to, you’ve probably heard the word ‘plugin’ bandied about a fair bit. Without getting too technical, a plugin is a program that can add some functionality to your WordPress site.
There are thousands of plugins for practically anything you can think of, but it can be hugely confusing knowing which ones to choose at the start. The best part is that most WordPress plugins are free. Here I’ve compiled a list of 6 essential ones to get you started. If I were launching a new blog tomorrow, lets just say I wouldn’t go live without these 6 plugins; they’re that important.
6 Essential WordPress Plugins for beginners
1. Akismet
Akismet filters out your comment and track back spam for you. As your blog grows, unfortunately the spammers grow too. So you need Akismet from day one. Just install it and let it do all the work. In my experience it’s pretty good at catching all the spam with around a 99% accuracy rate.
2. Yoast SEO
No matter what anybody says, SEO is still super important. Yoast SEO plugin takes care of all the technical side of SEO and it helps you make your content more SEO friendly by making you think about and choose keywords for each and every blog post. There are many SEO plugins for WordPress but this is one of the best.
3. Google Analytics by MonsterInsights
MonsterInsights allows you to connect your wordpress blog with Google Analytics. So if you want to know where your visitors come from and what they do on your blog, this is the plugin to use. Once you’ve added this plugin you can login to your Google Analytics account (which you’ll need first ) and watch your stats grow.
4. Broken Link Checker
As the name suggests, Broken Link Checker scans your blog for broken links and then gives you an update. This plugin is really useful as no one likes to land on that horrible 404 error page. And one more thing, install this at the start and not after you’ve got hundreds of posts like I did. I ended up spending hours fixing all my broken links!
5. W3 Total Cache
The speed of your site is an important SEO factor and most important to your visitor. No potential reader is going to hang around a site that takes a while to load. That’s where W3 Total Cache comes in. It improves SEO and user experience by compressing and caching files. In other words, your website works faster and more efficiently.
6. Sumo
We all know the importance of building an email list. And even more so if you want to turn your blog in to a business. It’s so important that we think you need to start from day one. Just having a subscribe box in your sidebar no longer works. So for a beginner we recommend the Sumo wordpress plugin. You can start with the basic free version which works for up to 200 subscribers. After that you’ll need to upgrade to a paid plan either with sumo or there are lots of other email plugins for wordpress. But we’ll cover that in another post.
Once you’ve used self-hosted WordPress for a while you can start experimenting with different plugins and see which ones work for you and which don’t. Next time I’ll be sharing some of the best plugins to share your content so watch out for the next post in a couple of weeks.
P.S. Are you ready to start a blog? Check out our ‘Launch your blog’ course.
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